Ball of Collusion Page 5

  “Horrifying!” As we’ve seen, candidates can get chirpy at final presidential debates less than three weeks from Election Day, and Hillary Clinton was no exception. What “horror” had her inveighing so? The very thought that her Republican rival would question the legitimacy of the presidential election.37

  Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he wouldn’t budge. He would not pledge to accept the election results a priori. Okay, no, Trump didn’t use the phase a priori. But he did speculate that the electoral process could be rigged. Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the outcome would be on the up-and-up.

  First, he reaffirmed an allegation for which he’d already been roundly condemned: foreigners could swing the election—specifically, “millions” of ineligible voters, an allusion to illegal immigration, the piñata of Trump’s campaign. Second, he complained about the gross one-sidedness of the media’s campaign coverage: scathing when it came to him; between inattentive and fawning when it came to his opponent, whose considerable sins were airbrushed away. Third, he claimed there was deep corruption: Clinton, he maintained, should not have been permitted to run given the evidence of felony misconduct uncovered in her email scandal. Instead of prosecuting her, law-enforcement agencies of the Democratic administration bent over backwards to give her a pass, and congressional Democrats closed ranks around her, conducting themselves in committee hearings more like her defense lawyers than investigators searching for the truth.

  A flabbergasted Clinton responded that she was shocked—horrified—to hear Trump “talking down our democracy” this way. This was a top theme in her campaign’s closing days: The election was absolutely legitimate; Trump was traitorously condemnable for refusing to say so.

  Of course, Clinton and the Democrats who parroted her would prefer that you forget that now. And given her strained relationship with the truth, they’re right to suspect that you’d never retain anything she said for very long. The media–Democrat caterwauling over Trump’s election-rigging spiel was not rooted in patriotic commitment to the American democratic tradition of accepting election outcomes. They said what they said because they fully expected to win. The polls all said they would. Mrs. Clinton and her backers, President Obama included, would not abide a taint of illegitimacy affixing itself to her inevitable presidency.

  Except it wasn’t so inevitable. And when Clinton lost, they changed their tune about election-rigging. Suddenly, the inconceivable, the heresy-even-to-hint-at, was to be taken as gospel: The outcome was illegitimate! Russia hacked the election!

  There was, however, a very inconvenient problem for this narrative: everything of significance that is known to the U.S. government about Russian meddling was already known in those pre-election weeks when Clinton and the Democrats were vouching for the integrity of the process and condemning Trump for even hesitating to endorse it.

  By now, the story is well known.38 Russia’s cyberespionage operations began in 2014, long before Donald Trump’s entry into the race. By summer 2015, hackers believed to be connected to Russian intelligence agencies had access to DNC computer networks, and the FBI began warning DNC officials of this in the September of that year—albeit with a lack of urgency that now seems stunning. In March 2016 came the hacking of a private email account belonging to John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, who was sufficiently versed in cyber privacy issues to have authored a 2014 report on the subject while serving as a top Obama White House advisor.

  U.S. intelligence agencies were intimately aware of the penetrations. Obama’s national intelligence director, James Clapper, publicly acknowledged that hackers appeared to have targeted presidential campaigns. By August 2016, CIA Director John Brennan interpreted streams of foreign intelligence to indicate that Putin had personally ordered the cyber thefts with the intention of at least damaging Clinton, if not flipping the election to Trump. In a phone call, Brennan is said to have admonished Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s security service (the FSB), to desist. The next month, in a face-to-face confrontation (through interpreters) at an international conference in China, Obama warned Putin that “we knew what he was doing and [he] better stop it or else.” Meanwhile, the administration conducted numerous high-level, close-hold meetings, weighing several options including retaliatory cyber attacks.

  Ultimately, Obama decided to do nothing. The president’s political allies and media admirers are now embarrassed about his inaction—“It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend. I feel like we sort of choked,” one anonymous senior administration official told The Washington Post. As ever, though, they remain apologists for their man, portraying a pained POTUS, fearful that any action he took would make matters worse, or be perceived as political, or otherwise undermine confidence in the election.

  What, then, is the collusion narrative? And what’s their story now? It is pretty much the same story they rebuked Trump for telling. They peddle a three-part rigged-election claim: (1) foreign interference, not by illegal aliens who may have voted but by Russians who did not affect the voting process; (2) one-sided press coverage—they mean the Russian propaganda press and the WikiLeaks release of DNC and John Podesta emails, which they’d now have you believe had more influence on Americans than did the media-Democrat complex and the grudging State Department release of Hillary Clinton’s own emails; and (3) the corruption that lifted a low-character candidate who should not have been allowed to run but who received extraordinary government assistance—not from the Obama Justice Department but from the Putin regime.

  To assess the Democratic narrative as bunk is not to excuse Russian duplicity, which many of us were warning about while Bush was embracing Putin as a strategic partner and while Obama was “resetting” with all due “flexibility.”

  By late October, the Russian “cyberespionage” effort to meddle in the election was well known. In the same debate in which Clinton rebuked Trump for refusing to concede the election’s legitimacy, she attacked her rival as “Putin’s puppet” and cited the finding of government agencies that Russia sought to interfere in the election. Clinton was not at all concerned that Putin’s shenanigans would have any actual impact on the election. She invoked them because she thought it was helpful to her campaign—an opportunity to portray Trump as ripe for rolling by the Russian regime.

  And how could she have taken any other position? None other than President Obama himself observed that there was nothing unusual about Russian scheming to influence American elections, which he said “dates back to the Soviet Union.”39 Obama deftly avoided mentioning that past scheming had never gotten much media traction because the Soviets had been more favorably disposed towards Democrats. While he blamed the Putin regime for hacking emails during the 2016 campaign, Obama described this as “fairly routine.” He acknowledged, moreover, that it was publicly notorious well in advance of the election—which, of course, is why Clinton had been able to exploit it in a nationally televised debate three weeks prior to November 8.

  What happened here is very simple: Russia was unimportant to Democrats, and was indeed avoided by Democrats, until they needed to rationalize a stunning defeat. Prior to the election, Democrats had little interest in mentioning “Russia” or “Putin.” Of course, they sputtered out the words when they had no choice—when, not wanting to address the substance of embarrassing emails, they had to shift attention to the nefarious theft of those emails.

  Beyond that, attention to the Kremlin was bad news for Clinton. It invited scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation’s suspicious foreign dealings, Bill Clinton’s lucrative speech racket, Hillary’s biddable State Department, and Russia’s acquisition of major U.S. uranium supplies. It conjured embarrassing memories of the “Russia Reset,” during which the supine Obama administration watched Putin capture territory in Eastern Europe and muscle his way into the Middle East, all while arming and aligning with Iran. It called to mind the intriguing relationship between Pode
sta (the Clinton-campaign chairman and former Obama White House official) and Putin’s circle—specifically, a $35 million investment by a Putin-created venture capital firm, Rusnano, into a small Massachusetts energy company, Joule Energy, just two months after Podesta joined Joule’s board.40

  So, while Donald Trump’s Russia rhetoric ranged from the unseemly (blowing kisses at an anti-American thug) to the delusional (the notion that Russia, Iran’s new friend, could be a reliable ally against jihadism) to the reprehensible (moral equivalence between the murderous Putin regime and American national-defense operations), Clinton’s own Russia baggage rendered her unable to exploit it.

  It was only afterward, after she lost a contest she thought she had in the bag, that the election turned illegitimate.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What Investigation … And What Started It?

  ‘Fox News anchor Chris Wallace burst viewers’ bubble,” crowed the Daily Beast. The media–Democrat complex was popping its buttons because Fox News’s highly regarded anchor had delivered his audience the purportedly devastating and unimpeachably factual news that the Trump–Russia investigation did not begin with the infamous Steele dossier.1

  Wallace was reacting to a clip of Rush Limbaugh’s observation, in a then-recent Fox News interview, that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI “began an investigation based on a phony dossier created and written by associates of Hillary Clinton”—the Steele dossier. No, Wallace countered, “The Trump investigation did not start with the FISA warrant and Carter Page and the dossier.” To the contrary, “It started in June and July of 2016 when George Papadopoulos had spoken to a Russian agent and spoke to an Australian diplomat and said he had heard they had information on—dirt on Hillary Clinton.”

  I am a Chris Wallace fan, and was one long before I became a contributor at Fox News. The Fox firmament is fairly described as right-leaning, and its primetime options are laden with opinion programming. The network’s best product, though, is its straight news coverage. Wallace is at the top of the class: a fact-driven journalist who prizes getting it right over getting it Right. Still, his snapshot of the Trump–Russia investigation’s Origin Story—a tale designed to defy accurate rendering—was woefully incomplete.

  The Origin Story has been the subject of cacophonous debate, foreign intrigue, spy games, stonewalling, and media scripting. In a sense, in scoffing at the claim that everything flows from the Carter Page FISA warrant, which was substantially based on the Steele dossier, Wallace and others have to be right. No investigation ever starts with a FISA warrant.

  A good deal of gumshoe effort is generally needed to get an investigation to the point where a warrant may be sought. The warrant permits what is still called “wiretapping” and “bugging,” the lexicon of a bygone technological time. In Justice Department lingo, such monitoring is known as “elsur,” short for electronic surveillance. Today, it involves eavesdropping not just on people’s phone calls and back-room meetings; there are emails, texts, social media posts, and the like—torrents of communications by wire, cable, satellite, and all manner of complex telecom. Caught in the mix are providers from the legacy phone companies, to newer telecoms, to such social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Gone are the days of simple analog technology transmitting waves of sound by hard wire; modern communications technology zooms packets of digital data, disassembled and reassembled across vast global networks. Now, investigators are vexed by apps that scramble the packets in order to defeat eavesdropping, to say nothing of the legal and technological challenges posed by millions of seemingly indiscriminate communications racing through the internet’s “upstream,” which we’ll encounter in Chapter 5.

  The pejorative term for intruding on these communications is spying. To get a judicial warrant permitting it, whether in a criminal or a counterintelligence probe, is no layup. Such a warrant is sought at an advanced stage of an investigation because agents must work hard to corroborate the factual claims on which they will ask a judge to base the legally mandated probable cause finding. Further, Congress has prescribed numerous approval hoops, including sign-offs by top officials at the FBI and Justice Department. These agencies and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in turn, impose additional vetting procedures. As a practical matter, a proper application may not be made to the court until a considerable amount of investigative grunt work has been done.

  Even those, like my friend Rush Limbaugh, who stress the foundational role of the so-called “dossier” and the Carter Page FISA warrant, acknowledge that, although the FBI began receiving Christopher Steele’s reports (eventually compiled into the dossier) in July 2016, no warrant was sought until October, three months later. The problem is not that the FBI did not try to verify Steele’s information; it is that the Bureau was not able to verify it (in addition to having good reasons to know that parts of it were ridiculous, that Steele’s credibility was suspect, and that Steele himself did not claim that his information was accurate—just worrisome and worthy of further investigation).

  That said, to concede that the Trump–Russia investigation did not begin with the dossier-fueled spying on Page is not an admission that it commenced in the early summer of 2016, due to reports about Papadopoulos. In truth, by then it had been going on for several months—since at least the latter half of 2015, not long after Donald Trump entered the GOP nomination chase and before most anyone had ever heard of George Papadopoulos.

  More Than One Investigation

  Just as with collusion, there is confusion about what the ambiguous term investigation means in the variegated context of Russia-gate.

  There is, for example, the FISA investigation. FISA surveillance is classified, and our knowledge of its extent in the Trump–Russia investigation remains incomplete. We do know, however, that there was a FISA investigation of Page.2 In Justice Department and FBI parlance, it is common to refer to a “FISA investigation” (just as in organized crime, prosecutors and agents speak of a “wiretap investigation”) as if it were an entity separate and apart from the pre-existing, overarching investigation that generated the probable-cause evidence for the FISA coverage. The FISA surveillance is not actually separate, but it is spoken of as such because elsur has a legal process of its own, involving court applications and reports that do not necessarily affect the rest of the investigation. Other investigative techniques, such as physical surveillance (i.e., following people around), using informants, conducting interviews, and some methods of gathering business and financial records, do not require court warrants, even though these techniques are typically used in tandem with, and informed by, court-authorized electronic surveillance.

  To refer to “the investigation” in Russia-gate is also confusing because the FBI investigation was not the only one. The CIA and allied foreign intelligence services—especially Britain’s spy agencies—did a fair amount of Trump–Russia probing before the FBI got involved.

  Herculean efforts are still being made to obscure this history, the telling of which could expose some foreign “collusion” in the 2016 campaign that Democrats and other Trump detractors are not so anxious to broadcast. More importantly, it could lead to tit-for-tat revelations about clandestine American misadventures, to say nothing of the rupturing of intelligence-sharing arrangements critical to U.S. national security.

  The CIA is not supposed to involve itself in American political campaigns, much less spy on Americans. Our intelligence community is not supposed to circumvent federal privacy laws by using allied intelligence services as a cat’s paw: nod-and-wink encouragement to friendly foreign agencies that investigate Americans then pass the information along to U.S. agencies. Our closest intelligence allies—Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which with the United States comprise the “Five Eyes”—pledge not to spy on each other’s government officials. Yet, the oft-heard claim that they do not monitor each other’s citizens is fiction. In 2016, at least some of the Five Eyes deemed Donald Trump and his
campaign fair game.3

  I believe the complicity of our allies, particularly Britain, partially explains why (as this book is written) President Trump has refrained from unsealing and publicizing most memoranda, files, and court documents pertaining to the Trump–Russia investigation’s origins. (I use the plural, origins, advisedly, as there may not have been a single big-bang moment.) Trump’s reluctance to disclose is also explained by a desire to avoid more accusations that he was obstructing the FBI and the Mueller probe.

  There is also the likelihood that disclosure, even if not incriminating, would be embarrassing for Trump. In nearly twenty years as a prosecutor, I wrote and litigated hundreds of search and eavesdropping warrant applications. Naturally, an application reflects the theory underlying the government’s investigation. The Obama administration’s theory was that Trump was involved in personal (i.e., sexual), financial, and possibly criminal misconduct (even espionage) that made him subject to blackmail by the Kremlin. We must therefore deduce that the intelligence agencies’ memoranda spell out these suspicions. Even if the suspicions are untrue, the president could obviously be wounded politically by the disclosure of FBI and CIA documents describing him as compromised and traitorous.

  Let us not forget: John Brennan, Obama’s former White House intelligence adviser and CIA director who blazed the Trump–Russia trail, has publicly accused Trump of treason, and of being “wholly in the pocket of Putin.” He leveled these hyper-partisan slanders in a way that intimates insider knowledge.4 This is, to say the least, despicable conduct by a former official trusted with access to classified intelligence. But here’s what matters for our present purposes: (1), since Brennan had considerable influence over the government’s intelligence analyses, we should assume Trump would not be flattered by their public release; and (2), the Justice Department and intelligence community’s virulent opposition to disclosure of their files renders it very difficult to chart when and how the international, multi-agency investigations of suspected Trump–Putin ties began.